with
those twenty-five gold sovereigns? For Dickie thought of them just as
sovereigns--and so they were.

And as these people who loved him, who were his own, drew nearer and
nearer to his heart--his heart, quickened by love of them, felt itself
drawn more and more to Mr. Beale. Mr. Beale, the tramp, who had been
kind to him when no one else was. Mr. Beale, the tramp and housebreaker.

So when the nurse took him, tired with new happinesses, to that
beautiful tapestried room of his, he roused himself from his good soft
sleepiness to say--

"Nurse, you know a lot of things, don't you?"

"I know what I know," she answered, undoing buttons with speed and
authority.

"You know that other dream of mine--that dream of mine, I mean, the
dream of a dreadful place?"

"And then?"

"Could I take anything out of this dream--I mean out of this time into
the other one?"

"You could, but you must bring it back when you come again. And you
could bring things thence. Certain things: your rattle, your moon-seeds,
your seal."

He stared at her.

"You _do_ know things," he said; "but I want to take things there and
leave them there."

She knitted thoughtful brows.

"There's three hundred thick years between now and then," she said. "Oh,
yes, I know. And if you held it in your hand, you'd lose it like as not
in some of the years you go through. Money's mortal heavy and travels
slow. Slower than the soul of you, my lamb. Some one would have time to
see it and snatch it and hold to it."

"Isn't there any way?" Dickie asked, insisting to himself that he wasn't
sleepy.

"There's the way of everything--the earth," she said; "bury it, and lie
down on the spot where it's buried, and then, when you get back into the
other dream, the kind, thick earth will have hid your secret, and you
can dig it up again. It will be there ... unless other hands have dug
there in the three hundred years. You must take your chance of that."

"Will you help me?" Dickie asked. "I shall need to dig it very deep if I
am to cheat three hundred years. And suppose," he added, struck by a
sudden and unpleasing thought, "there's a house built on the place. I
should be mixed up with the house. Two things can't be in the same place
at the same time. My tutor told me that. And the house would be so much
stronger than me--it would get the best of it, and where should I be
then?"

"I'll ask where thou'd be," was the very surprising answer. "I'll ask
some one